Deft handling of a difficult and painful subject, slightly marred by one-dimensional people, but compelling nevertheless.
A young woman is forced to confront a long-held family secret: that her mother suffers from the mental illness known as Munchausen syndrome.
When Indie (Miranda) Brown is awakened in the middle of the night by a frantic phone call from her sister, Lily, she is not at all surprised. Midnight phone calls informing her that their mother has once again been hospitalized have become so commonplace that she's not even concerned. That is, until Lily begs her to come to Phoenix because their mother has been "poisoned." Indie leaves her stable and loving boyfriend only to find herself once more plunged headlong into the chaos that surrounds her severely dysfunctional family. Second-novelist Greenwood (Breathing Water, 1999) skillfully interweaves past and present as the trip triggers Indie's memories of a childhood scarred by her mother's neglect and abuse (Münchausen by proxy), as well as by her father's acceptance of that mistreatment. As everyone awaits the test results that will prove whether Indie's mother is being poisoned by her environment (her claim) or is slowly poisoning herself (her doctor's belief), both the results and the questions that go with them are rendered suddenly moot when she's killed in a car crash. Then Indie is shocked to discover that history has begun to repeat itself with Lily and her daughter, Violet, who has "mysteriously" stopped breathing on a number of occasions. A final confrontation between the sisters demonstrates that Lily is not the only one who has internalized the family pathology. By imitating their father's strategy of silence, Indie too is implicated in the cycle of abuse.
Deft handling of a difficult and painful subject, slightly marred by one-dimensional people, but compelling nevertheless.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26503-4
Page Count: 306
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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